“... Like Harman, Graner was a keen amateur photojournalist. At one point he shows an MP colleague, Joseph Darby, a picture of an inmate, naked apart from a bag over his head, sitting in a puddle. Graner tells Darby: ‘The Christian in me knows it’s wrong, but the corrections officer in me can’t help but love to make a grown man piss himself.’ However ...”

“... 1591), Spenser’s ‘Visions of Petrarch’ in Complaints (1591), Samuel Daniel’s Delia (1592), Michael Drayton’s Idea’s Mirror (1594) and Robert Tofte’s Laura (1597). Tofte is included for his title, but also as a representative of the many inferior warblers troubling the presses at this time. The glut of sweetmeats provoked a predictable backlash of ...”

“... led to a serious reconsideration of the classical tradition. It was at that time, the historian Joseph Levenson argued, that Chinese scholars ceased to write within a ‘tradition’ and began to write instead as ‘traditionalists’, vainly asserting the validity of a culture that would soon die out. Intellectuals who aim to restore the study of the ...”

“... a space that very soon became a single compacted block, an uncelebrated curation in the spirit of Joseph Beuys, or Phyllida Barlow’s recent mounds at Tate Britain. The higher they stack the investment silos of target architecture, the more those condemned to live in fallout shadows dig and scrape. A dowser and ley line tracker called Alan Hayday, formerly ...”

“... many suggestions he made that evening was that, when I was in Dublin again, I should go and see Michael Yeats, the son of the poet, who might be glad to meet someone who was interested in his grandfather as much as his father – and to spend time with someone who was brought up, as I was, in a Fianna Fáil family (Fianna Fáil being at the time the main ...”

“... to Maud Gonne, and then became involved with her daughter Iseult, to whom he also proposed. Joseph Hone writes about this in his authorised biography of the poet, published in 1942. When Iseult finally rejected him in the summer of 1917, he decided to propose to a young Englishwoman, Georgie Hyde-Lees. He wrote to Lady Gregory: ‘I certainly feel very ...”

“... left behind.’ ‘Gay men had as much use for condoms as for tampons,’ France notes. He quotes Joseph Sonnabend, one of the first clinicians to investigate Aids. ‘I think most gay men said: “Oh thank God, that’s one thing we don’t have to worry about.”’ In 1973, a gay bar in New Orleans was deliberately set on fire: 32 people died. No charges ...”

“... Add to this list critical race theory and disability studies – exemplified here by Joseph Valente’s bold essay on late Yeats – and you have the agenda. Guides to the territory have now appeared, in The New Irish Studies edited by Paige Reynolds and the edgy and enormous Routledge International Handbook of Irish Studies. The mix of topics ...”

“... this, but the best is probably to begin with its dedication. The book is devoted to the memory of Michael Oakeshott – whose thought, Mount tells us, has left its traces, ‘no doubt sadly smudged’, on many of its pages. At first glance, the affinity between author and authority seems straightforward enough, for Oakeshott was widely held to be the most ...”

“... desires and passions to be disciplined and brought to heel’. Berlin ended his essay by quoting Joseph Schumpeter: ‘To realise the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.’ In the jargon I have been developing, this translates into the claim that the liberal ...”

“... party that our parents were insistent should not include the children from the terraced houses,’ Michael Burns wrote, recalling VE Day celebrations in Tolworth near Kingston. And it was much the same eight years later in New Malden at the Coronation festivities (‘They’re much too posh for street party’ was the headline in the People). If there is a ...”

“... offers a frightening gallery of rogue vents – from Eric von Stroheim in The Great Gabbo to Michael Redgrave in Dead of Night and Anthony Hopkins in Magic – who have been led astray by their dummy-selves; and real vents can be just as mixed up as fictional ones. When the English entertainer Arthur Prince died in 1948, his jolly partner Jim was ...”

“... by Trump to urinate on the bed Obama had used on a visit to Moscow; that Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen had travelled to Prague for secret briefings with Kremlin officials and hackers; that another Trump staffer had discussed sanctions relief at a meeting with Igor Sechin, the head of Russia’s state-owned oil company, Rosneft; or that Trump had ...”

“... both in Heaney’s contribution to Homage to Robert Frost (which he published in 1997 with Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott) and in such poems as ‘Weighing In’ and ‘The Swing’ (an Ulster version of Frost’s ‘Birches’) in The Spirit Level (1996), the most recent book of his excerpted for Opened Ground. Of course, nothing in Heaney’s late ...”

“... of films that idealised the Soviet Union. This fascinates Hoberman. In 1943, as he notes, we find Michael Curtiz’s Mission to Moscow, made to celebrate Ambassador Joseph Davies’s journey of friendship to Russia in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. Earlier, of course, Russia had been quarantined by America: in the late ...”